Oliv continued...

For months I have been wanting to go to Oliv, and I finally got to go on my birthday. It was worth the wait.

Located on Academy Road in the city, Oliv is a specialty olive oil and vinegar store that offers tastings of a variety of flavoured olive oils and balsamic vinegars.  Using a good quality olive oil or balsamic vinegar in your cooking does make a world of difference in really bringing out flavours that seem to dance on your palate.

We first browsed the balsamic vinegars and sampled an 18-year-old balsamic vinegar and smoked balsamic vinegar. We also tried some white balsamic vinegars flavoured with raspberry and chocolate, blood orange, and mango. They had many more interesting and unusual flavours that I didn't think could be infused with balsamic vinegar. We'll try those next time. Anyway, the traditional balsamic vinegars had more bold flavours and were tangy while the white balsamic vinegars were much sweeter and would be perfect over top of some yogurt or even a spinach salad with some fresh berries and pecans? Yum!

On to the oils! Most of the olive oils were infused with herbs and vegetables such as basil, garlic and italian herb blends. We tried the italian herb blend first which had a very dominant flavour. We also tried the basil, jalapeno and chipotle-flavoured oils.

After our tasting, M. and I finally settled on three bottles. For this first visit, we chose some basics. We picked up the 18-year balsamic vinegar, smoked balsamic vinegar, and the chipotle olive oil.  We were told that if we bought 5 bottles we could get the 6th free, and while this was tempting, we weren't overly keen on dropping $100 on oil and vinegar. We wanted to buy a white balsamic vinegar flavour but it was $3 more a bottle and after our total bill of $63 we felt that we did enough damage to our budget. 

Here are some pictures of what other treats this lovely store has to offer:

Maybe at Christmas we can go back and pick up some white balsamic vinegar. I bet the Fig-flavoured white balsamic vinegar would be amazing on cheesecake! Can't wait to return. So far, we have tried the smoked flavoured vinegar over top of baked cauliflower ,and it was really enjoyable. We could taste some of the smokiness. Next time, we are going to drizzle it over some sweet potato fries!